Shanghai Daily news

Night life across the river has always paled beside its Puxi neighbor but with Changyi Road now boasting a strip of four bars, things are changing. Douglas Williams talks with the landlord of one, The Old Tavern.

Canadian Stan Dulenty in The Old Tavern, his pub on Changyi Road in Pudong.— Douglas Williams

For someone in love with major construction projects, Pudong was the place to be in the late 1990s.
Stan Dulenty is a carpenter turned construction project manager and now owner/manager of The Old Tavern pub at 549 Changyi Road in Pudong. He arrived in Shanghai in 1998 having heard there were more tower cranes in this city than in all of North America. "I'm like a kid in a sweet store here in Pudong, watching all this fantastic building work going on," he says with sincere glee.
His pub will celebrate its first birthday next month. As befits a carpenter's pub there's a lot of wood inside and outside. Reclaimed Canadian Douglas fir, from a Shanghai factory, has been used giving the place a distinctly rustic feel - the antithesis to the city's ultra-cool style bars, and more honest than the twee Irish pubs.
With the swing entrance door, some good old fashioned rock 'n' roll playing and the clack of the balls on the pool table upstairs it doesn't require an enormous imaginative leap to see oneself in a bar in Dulenty's native Maritime provinces of Canada.
The Old Tavern isn't the biggest of pubs but upstairs there's the aforementioned slate-bed pool table, darts and even a chill out library area and with three other boozers within 50 meters, Changyi Road has all the makings of a neat little pub crawl.
"We think Changyi Road will become the 'Maoming Road' or the 'Julu Road of Pudong'," says the highly entertaining and anything but wooden Canuck.
He claims he got into pubs due to his fondness for drinking and his desire to make money from it as opposed to the proverbial. His son also lives in Shanghai and Dulenty is now a proud grandfather at the age of 45.
"With four pubs in this area just now it will become Pudong's center, something this side of the river has previously lacked," he says. "On this street there are also a couple of coffee shops and a good Hong Kong restaurant which recently opened. It's easy enough for Pudong folks to hop a taxi across to Puxi but staying local is always good. We've seen that there are plenty of customers here."
Certainly there was a warm, humor-laden banter between the customers, Dulenty and his staff when the Shanghai Daily visited and again the feel was very much that of a down-home pub. This was possibly for our benefit but it felt genuine. There were a variety of customers from dry Canucks to not-so-dry Irish to local Chinese.
The Old Tavern doesn't appear in any of the city's rash of entertainment listings magazines because Dulenty prefers that his customers come through word-of-mouth promotion. "We tried advertising with earlier projects and didn't find it very useful. Happy customers telling their friends is much stronger," he says.
Ultra-modern and ultra-urban Pudong is a far cry from whence Dulenty originated - New Brunswick, Canada.
"I'm from so far in the sticks I had to come out to hunt," says the son of Irish immigrant farming and fishing folk. He is the eighth of 11 children - "We didn't have TV and the winters were long and dark," he says with a wink.
The three years in Shanghai is the longest Dulenty has spent anywhere in his adult life, roving across North America and Europe before arriving in China seven years ago. His work as project manager in the construction industry has taken him around China.
"I haven't been any place in China I didn't like. The Chinese people are wonderful and they're the best grafters I've ever come across," and that's quite a commendation since Dulenty has worked with a wide assortment of people from Canadian lumberjacks to Mexican bricklayers to German electricians.
He also commented on the safeness of living in China where he hasn't had any trouble in all his time here and on the happiness of the people: "You never see a miserable Chinese person, not like in the West where most of the people look fed up most of the time."
His initial impression of Pudong back in the late-1990s was that it was a marshy bog. Along with 125 other Canadians he was heavily involved with the construction of the Shanghai Links where an expensive piece of his plant exasperatingly sank without trace in the marsh. "We had 39 days of straight rain and there was mud everywhere. Compared with how Pudong was then and how it is now, it's amazing. I love the boldness and the futuristic nature of the architecture, I think the Jin Mao Tower is gorgeous."
On living in Pudong, Dulenty, deep tanned from years of working outside, says he appreciates the cleaner air: "The air is better than in Puxi and it's a bit quieter, less hustle and bustle, more relaxed. You can see more sky a lot of the time in Pudong and, importantly, you get a lot more apartment for your money.
"The traffic is also better," he adds confessing that as an aggressive driver he is well suited to the Chinese roads.
As to being Canadian here in China, Dulenty has two words - "Norman Bethune." The great doctor who worked in China during the Japanese occupation was described by the late Chairman Mao Zedong thus: "As a selfless internationalist, Doctor Bethune served as a role model for every human being," and whose name all Shanghai taxi drivers exclaim thumbs up when Dulenty tells his nationality.